The tomb was opened in 1981. It contained two lead caskets. In the first, apart from the skeletal remains, the archeologists found: “a white cloth with brown embroidery, a white cloth with red embroidery, a piece of beige silk with woven pattern and a piece of brown unpatterned silk”. Apart from these there was a piece of “crumpled white cloth with a geometric pattern containing fragments of unpatterned cloth”. The other casket contained three skulls of unknown women, “two of them wrapped in brown silk and one in purple silk”.[2]

“[…] according to written sources, a tradition of embroidery existed in St. George’s monastery, this material […] may have been domestic in origin. If it was imported, then probably from the German area or from Egypt.” It was dated to second half of Xth century, and the C14 dating indicated 1024±40.[3]

On several occasions I’ve seen this pattern being called “dragons”. Are they indeed? They do not seem to correspond to other depictions of dragons, for example the carved heads for the boats, or the carvings in stone from the Isle of Man cross. On the other hand, this does look like two heads with open jaws, connected by a neck. Whatever they are, it’s a well established pattern from the early medieval period.

The pattern from St. Ludmila’s grave seems streched or alongated vertically (on the photo of the original textile). There are two reasons for this. Firstly, note that the density of warp and weft is slithly different. Secondly, it is not based strickly on a “square”. Let me explain what I mean on a drawing:

This is the embroidery scheme. The black dots are the places, where the needle goes through the fabric, and the blue lines are the thread that is left on the surface. As you can see, it doesn’t exactly follow squares, more of a rectangle.

Wzór składa się z dwóch powtarzających się elementów:The sun symbol seems to be about 18 threads to the left from the “dragon”, and about 20 threads above the lower head (I’m talking about the line where I wrote “more space here” 😉 ).